Wednesday, March 23, 2016

I
need a shot, or something. Monday, March 21st, I heard Hillary Clinton’s
diatribe to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC. And I am sick. Does she not watch the news? I
know the reporting by the US media is framed and slanted, but the few images out
of Gaza that do come through are enough
to make anyone sick to the stomach.

Over
and over again she referred to Israel as Jewish and democratic. But, even she
knows that it can be one or the other but it can’t be both. Half of the people
over whom Israel rules is not Jewish. Israel is not democratic, never has been
and Hillary Clinton knows it.

She
boldly states that Israel and the US share the same values. Well, I hope not:
Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and Nobel
Peace Prize nominee, writes:

Terrorism is a form of violent struggle in
which violence is used against civilians in order to achieve political goals.

This definition
would seem to apply to Israel’s own policies toward the Palestinians, beginning
with the expulsion of half the Palestinian people from their country, the
systematic destruction of 536 villages, towns and urban neighborhoods and the
expropriation of their lands, and up to today where military occupation of five
decades has resulted in the deaths and injury of tens of thousands of
civilians, massive arrest and torture, the demolition of some 60,00 homes, impoverishment,
further displacement and expulsion – and open “punishment” for the crime of
turning to the ICC for protection.[1]

I
share moral values with this Jewish writer who has witnessed Israel’s
“democracy” first hand. Israel is a brutal occupier and thinks nothing of
killing innocent people, including women and children. Clinton it wrong. There
are millions of Americans including many Jews who do NOT share Israel’s values.
If Hillary Clinton shares Israel’s
values and becomes president of the US, America could become a police state run
by the military of whom she will be
the Commander in Chief.

She
says, as president, she would immediately attack BDS. This is a non-violent grassroots movement
designed to expose Israel’s atrocities. In other words, to her, violence is justified,
objection to violence is not.

Then,
she lifted up Golda Meir as her example of leadership. In doing so, Clinton
commits herself to be as blind to reality as was Meir who is famous for saying:

There is no such thing as a Palestinian
people, Meir told the Sunday Times of London. It is not as if we came and threw
them out and took their country. They did not exist.

So,
the occupation drags on. But to Hillary Clinton, Golda Meir was a woman and
since Hillary is a woman, when it comes to choosing a leader, that is what matters
most, for honestly, that is about all that she has to offer. I agree. It is time for the US to have a woman
president, but just not this woman.
Which of course is exactly what she wants, not that it is time to have a woman, but it is time to have “me” as
president

One
could hope that she would just look at a map showing the 88 percent of what
used to be Palestine and compare it to the little landlocked areas in which
Israel confines the Palestinians today. Twelve
percent of their homeland, cut up by walls and Jewish only roads. She calls that a democracy and wants to be
the democratic leader of America.

She
justifies Israel’s disproportionate wars on Palestine by referring to suicide
bombers. The fact that there have been no suicide bombers in almost a decade is
not relevant to her.

Clinton
labels any resistance as acts of terrorism.
During her entire speech, she talked endlessly about terrorism. All
Palestinians, including the more than 500 children massacred in Gaza last
summer are automatically terrorist.

She
repeated the old charge that if Palestinians did not teach their children to
hate, we would have peace. I agree that
Palestinians children hate Israel. Blow up my home, uproot my family’s farm,
steal my water, bomb my school and murder my little sister, and you would not
have to “teach” me to hate. I would learn that all by myself. And what is so ironical is that it’s the
Jewish kids in Israel who are taught that non-Jews are lesser human beings who
threaten their security and want Israel to be wiped out.

Israeli
Intelligence Minister Yisreal Katz declared the situation as a state of war:

He vowed to push a parliamentary bill
through allowing the government to expel all relatives of the attackers,
whether they were involved in the attack or not. Suggesting a further crackdown
on people not involved in the attack, the Israeli military announced a
full-scale closure on the West Bank villages of Zawia and Auga on the grounds
that two of the attackers were originally from those villages.[2]

Someone should ask when has Israel NOT been in state of war. Halper writes:

Israel tops the list of countries in
intense international conflicts of the last two hundred years. Besides being
embroiled in an intense civil conflict during the half-century before the
establishment of the state in 1948, it has fought four conventional wars (1948,
1956, 1967, 1973, plus the 1967-70 War of Attrition), at least seven hybrid or
asymmetric ones (First Lebanon War 1982 with an occupation lasting until 2000;
First Intifada 1987-93, Second Intifada 2000-05, Second Lebanon War 2006, and
three assaults on Gaza 2008/9, 2012, 2014), plus mounting or participating in
innumerable operations and engagements inside Israel, in the Occupied Territories, throughout the
Middle East and well beyond. It continues to be engaged in one of the longest
securocratic wars of modern times: its occupation of the West Bank, East
Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights over the past nearly five decades.[3]

Halper
summed it up, (And I am working from memory here) by drawing a triangle: At the
top, he put “Jewish.” On the lower corner he put “Democratic” and on the last
point, “All the land.” Then Halper
announced that Israel could have any two of these it wanted, but could not have
all three.

One:
Israel could be Jewish and Democratic, but then could not have all the land.
(the traditional two-state solution.)

Two:
Israel could be Democratic and have all the land, but could not then be Jewish.
(One democratic nation for all its citizens.) Or,

Three:
Israel could have all the land and be Jewish, but could not then be democratic.
(An apartheid state controlling the Palestinians by force.)

In
spite of its military might and its trigger-happy option to use it, like most
empires of history, Israel may crumble from within. Whether it survives remains
to be seem. If, or when, that happens, it will leave millions of innocent
victims, Jewish and Palestinian. So sad.

Reflecting
on all this, I have changed my mind. I
don’t need the shot. Hillary Clinton is running an Israeli fever. But, I am not
hopeful. As someone pointed out, you just can’t give a flu shot to a tombstone.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

We
know a lot about him. Taylor Force grew up in Texas, loved horses, was an avid
skier, played the guitar, graduated from West Point, served as an officer in
Iraq and Afghanistan, lived in Lexington, Kentucky before moving to Nashville
to continue his studies at Vanderbilt. “He
lived really large.” His father said of him. A friend remembered his as a
peaceful, kind and just an all-American guy. Then he went on a school trip to
Israel where he was stabbed to death by an outraged Palestinian. By any
measure, 29 year old Taylor Force was an innocent victim and his death was an
unnecessary tragedy. I can only imagine
how I would feel if it had been my son.

My
local newspaper headlines, “American Student Latest Victim in Palestinian
Violence.” Vice President Joe Biden said
“the U.S. not only deplored a recent wave of Palestinian attacks in Israel but
also condemns the failure to condemn these acts.” Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu points to the challenges Israel faces. “The first one is the persistent
incitement in Palestine society that glorifies murderers of innocent people and
calls for a Palestinian state not to live in peace with Israel, but to replace
Israel.”[i]

My
newspaper seems to forget Israeli daily violence committed against Palestinians
on their own land, both by the IDF and by settlers. Joe Biden, as usual, blames
the conflict on the resistance and not on the occupation. And poor Netanyahu
believes his own propaganda that it is the Palestinian and not his Israeli
government that glorifies violence.

However,
when seen in context, Taylor Force was just one of the many innocent victims of
Israel’s oppression. And unless we are willing to remember, face and address
that context, Taylor Force will have died in vain. He stepped into a hornet’s
nest of hostility.

Less
than two years ago, over 500 children were killed during Israel’s bombardment of
Gaza which deliberately targeted schools, hospitals and water supplies. Today, Gaza
is an open air prison lacking housing, water, food, medicine and electricity.
Its people, most of them refugees from Israel’s previous aggressions, have been
used as a testing ground for Israel’s arms and surveillance market. In the West Bank, Jewish only roads and a twenty-five
foot wall separate families from their loved ones, farmers from their fields,
children from their schools and the sick from their hospitals… all justified,
defended and financed by the U.S. in the name of “security.” No one dares ask about
“Palestinian security?”

Does
anyone question what is going on that would cause young kids to sacrifice their
lives to express their frustration. It is too simple to just label them
“terrorist.” That label has lost its sting. Anyone who resists being occupied and abused has been called a terrorist.

I
don’t know if Taylor Force was targeted because he was an American, but he was
certainly put in harm’s way and set up by US indifference to Israel’s violence.

Thomas L. Are

I preached for forty three years in the Presbyterian Church before retiring. If anyone would ever refer to me as a Liberation Theologian, I would be pleased. I started blogging several years ago to express my political and religious concern for justice, especially justice for the Palestinians.